Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Back in No Time The Brion Gysin Reader by Brion Gysin Back in No Time: The Brion Gysin Reader by Brion Gysin. His innovations include early sound poetry and a scientifically-researched device known as the Dreamachine . Despite forging a creative practice that would influence some of the twentieth century’s most important artists, from the Beat Generation to Bowie, Gysin has slipped into relative obscurity. His anonymity is in stark contrast to his lifelong friend and collaborator William S. Burroughs, whose Naked Lunch became a countercultural bible and must-read for any teenage recluse. Gysin was born in England to Canadian parents in 1916. He was introduced into Surrealist circles while studying at the Sorbonne, and after the war accompanied Paul Bowles to Morocco. It was there that Gysin met Burroughs. The two ended up back in Paris together in 1958 at the infamous Beat Hotel. Their experiments with the cut-up technique, in which words and phrases are literally cut up into pieces and rearranged to disassociate them from their received meanings and reveal new ones, culminated in Burroughs and Gysin’s The Third Mind , a book-length collage manifesto on the possibilities of the practice. From the late 1950s to the early 1960s, Gysin’s style manifested itself in a series of calligraphic paintings and drawings that he produced in Morocco. Fluent in written Japanese and Arabic, Gysin’s script-like canvases represent an attempt to fuse writing and painting into a single complex system of mark-making. He used a grid formation, making marks from top to bottom as well as right to left, to create a dense pattern of abstract language. Circa 1960, Gysin collaborated with Ian Sommerville, a mathematician and budding computer scientist studying at Oxford. He and Sommerville were attempting to computerise the shift and change of words and sounds, naming these experiments with printed words and magnetic tape Permutations . Works like ‘Pistol Poem’, comprised solely of pistol shots recorded at varying distances, and the poem ‘I Am That I Am’ made him a pioneer of sound poetry. Embracing magnetic tape and computer technology, at a time when such practice was the preserve of scientists, Gysin equated his Permutations with those of a machine. He went on to perform these works around Europe, accompanied by music and handmade slide projections. Gysin believed that his Dreamachine would eclipse television. In 1961, Gysin and Sommerville developed the Dreamachine . A cylinder with slits cut in the sides and a suspended light bulb at its centre is placed on a record turntable and rotated at seventy-eight revolutions per minute; the rotation speed projects light at a constant frequency of eight to thirteen pulses per second, which corresponds to alpha waves present in the human brain during wakeful relaxation. The flickering light creates a trance-like hallucinatory state. For Gysin, the Dreamachine was the culmination of his research. With it, images were freed completely from representation. He believed that the future of painting was the mind, which could be an inexhaustible source of artistic revelation with the help of the Dreamachine . The piece was officially unveiled in March 1962 at an exhibition titled The Object at the Museé des Arts Decoratifs in Paris. It did in fact prove to be a source of artistic inspiration, though not to the degree Gysin hoped – he believed that his Dreamachine would eclipse television. Burroughs even thought it could be used to ‘storm the citadels of enlightenment.’ At the exhibition Brion Gysin: Dream Machine , the New Museum in New York invited viewers to experience a Dreamachine alongside notebooks and drafts for The Third Mind , letters between Gysin and Burroughs and videos of Gysin’s friends and collaborators. The exhibition also comprised Gysin’s calligraphic paintings, drawings, films and personal notebooks – all providing a platform for a rethinking of Gysin as an artist in his own right. I met New Museum curator Laura Hoptman to discuss the show and the dynamic relationship between Gysin and Burroughs. The Cut-Up Method. Writing is fifty years behind painting. I propose to apply the painters' techniques to writing; things as simple and immediate as collage or montage. Cut right through the pages of any book or newsprint. lengthwise, for example, and shuffle the columns of text. Put them together at hazard and read the newly constituted message. Do it for yourself. Use any system which suggests itself to you. Take your own words or the words said to be "the very own words" of anyone else living or dead. You'll soon see that words don't belong to anyone. Words have a vitality of their own and you or anybody else can make them gush into action. The permutated poems set the words spinning off on their own; echoing out as the words of a potent phrase are permutated into an expanding ripple of meanings which they did not seem to be capable of when they were struck into that phrase. The poets are supposed to liberate the words - not to chain them in phrases. Who told poets they were supposed to think? Poets are meant to sing and to make words sing. Poets have no words "of their own." Writers don't own their words. Since when do words belong to anybody. "Your very own words," indeed! And who are you? At a surrealist rally in the 1920s Tristan Tzara the man from nowhere proposed to create a poem on the spot by pulling words out of a hat. A riot ensued and wrecked the theater. Andr� Breton expelled Tristan Tzara from the movement and grounded the cut-ups on the Freudian couch. In the summer of 1959 Brion Gysin painter and writer cut newspaper articles into sections and rearranged the sections at random. "Minutes to Go" resulted from this initial cut-up experiment. "Minutes to Go" contains unedited unchanged cut-ups emerging as quite coherent and meaningful prose. The cut-up method brings to writers the collage, which has been used by painters for fifty years. And used by the moving and still camera. In fact all street shots from movie or still cameras are by the unpredictable factors of passersby and juxtaposition cut-ups. And photographers will tell you that often their best shots are accidents . . . writers will tell you the same. The best writings seems to be done almost by accident but writers until the cut-up method was made explicit-all writing is in fact cut-ups; I will return to this point-had no way to produce the accident of spontaneity. You cannot will spontaneity. But you can introduce the unpredictable spontaneous factor with a pair of scissors. The method is simple. Here is one way to do it. Take a page. Like this page. Now cut down the middle. You have four sections: 1 2 3 4 . . . one two three four. Now rearrange the sections placing section four with section one and section two with section three. And you have a new page. Sometimes it says much the same thing. Sometimes something quite different-cutting up political speeches is an interesting exercise-in any case you will find that it says something and something quite definite. Take any poet or writer you fancy. Brion Gysin (1916�1986) was a visual artist, historian, novelist, and an experimental poet credited with the discovery of the �cut-up� technique -- a collage of texts, not pictures -- which his longtime collaborator William S. Burroughs put to more extensive use. He is also considered one of the early innovators of sound poetry, which he defines as �getting poetry back off the page and into performance.� Back in No Time gathers materials from the entire Gysin oeuvre: scholarly historical study, baroque fiction, permutated and cut-up poetry, unsettling memoir, selections from The Process and The Last Museum, and his unproduced screenplay of Burroughs� novel Naked Lunch. In addition, the Reader contains complete texts of several Gysin pieces that are difficult to find, including "Poem of Poems," "The Pipes of Pan," and "A Quick Trip to Alamut." Here, say, or poems you have read over many times. The words have lost meaning and life through years of repetition. Now take the poem and type out selected passages. Fill a page with excerpts. Now cut the page. You have a new poem. As many poems as you like. As many Shakespeare and Rimbaud poems as you like. Tristan Tzara said: "Poetry is for everyone." And Andr� Breton called him a cop and expelled him from the movement. Say it again: "Poetry is for everyone." Poetry is a place and it is free to all cut up Rimbaud and you are in Rimbaud's place. Here is a Rimbaud poem cut up. "Visit of memories. Only your dance and your voice house. On the suburban air improbable desertions . . . all harmonic pine for strife. "The great skies are open. Candor of vapor and tent spitting blood laugh and drunken penance. Documentary film from 1997 on Brion Gysin's Dreamachine. "Promenade of wine perfume opens slow bottle. "The great skies are open. Supreme bugle burning flesh children to mist." Cut-ups are for everyone. Anybody can make cut-ups. It is experimental in the sense of being something to do. Right here write now. Not something to talk and argue about. Greek philosophers assumed logically that an object twice as heavy as another object would fall twice as fast. It did not occur to them to push the two objects off the table and see how they fall. Shakespeare Rimbaud live in their words. Cut the word lines and you will hear their voices. Cut- ups often come through as code messages with special meaning for the cutter. Table tapping? Perhaps. Certainly an improvement on the usual deplorable performances of contacted poets through a medium. Rimbaud announces himself, to be followed by some excruciatingly bad poetry. Cut Rimbaud's words and you are assured of good poetry at least if not personal appearance. All writing is in fact cut-ups. A collage of words read heard overheard. What else? Use of scissors renders the process explicit and subject to extension and variation. Clear classical prose can be composed entirely of rearranged cut-ups. Cutting and rearranging a page of written words introduces a new dimension into writing enabling the writer to turn images in cinematic variation. Images shift sense under the scissors smell images to sound sight to sound sound to kinesthetic. This is where Rimbaud was going with his color of vowels. And his "systematic derangement of the senses." The place of mescaline hallucination: seeing colors tasting sounds smelling forms. The cut-ups can be applied to other fields than writing. Dr Neumann in his Theory of Games and Economic Behavior introduces the cut-up method of random action into game and military strategy: assume that the worst has happened and act accordingly. If your strategy is at some point determined . . . by random factor your opponent will gain no advantage from knowing your strategy since he cannot predict the move. The cut-up method could be used to advantage in processing scientific data. How many discoveries have been made by accident? We cannot produce accidents to order. The cut-ups could add new dimension to films. Cut gambling scene in with a thousand gambling scenes all times and places. Cut back. Cut streets of the world. Cut and rearrange the word and image in films. There is no reason to accept a second-rate product when you can have the best. And the best is there for all. "Poetry is for everyone . . . Now here are the preceding two paragraphs cut into four sections and rearranged: DreamMachine Review. ALL WRITING IS IN FACT CUT-UPS OF GAMES AND ECONOMIC BEHAVIOR OVERHEARD? WHAT ELSE? ASSUME THAT THE WORST HAS HAPPENED EXPLICIT AND SUBJECT TO STRATEGY IS AT SOME POINT CLASSICAL PROSE. CUTTING AND REARRANGING FACTOR YOUR OPPONENT WILL GAIN INTRODUCES A NEW DIMENSION YOUR STRATEGY. HOW MANY DISCOVERIES SOUND TO KINESTHETIC? WE CAN NOW PRODUCE ACCIDENT TO HIS COLOR OF VOWELS. AND NEW DIMENSION TO FILMS CUT THE SENSES. THE PLACE OF SAND. GAMBLING SCENES ALL TIMES COLORS TASTING SOUNDS SMELL STREETS OF THE WORLD. WHEN YOU CAN HAVE THE BEST ALL: "POETRY IS FOR EVERYONE" DR NEUMANN IN A COLLAGE OF WORDS READ HEARD INTRODUCED THE CUT-UP SCISSORS RENDERS THE POCESS GAME AND MILITARY STRATEGY. VARIATION CLEAR AND ACT ACCORDINGLY. IF YOU POSED ENTIRELY OR REARRANGED CUT DETERMINED BY RANDOM A PAGE OF WRITTEN WORDS NO ADVANTAGE FROM KNOWING INTO WRITER PREDICT THE MOVE. THE CUT VARIATION IMAGES SHIFT SENSE ADVANTAGE IN PROCESSING TO SOUND SIGHT TO SOUND. HAVE BEEN MADE BY ACCIDENT IS WHERE RIMBAUD WAS GOING WITH ORDER THE CUT-UPS COULD "SYSTEMATIC DERANGEMENT" OF THE GAMBLING SCENE IN WITH A TEA HALLUCINATION: SEEING AND PLACES. CUT BACK. CUT FORMS. REARRANGE THE WORD AND IMAGE TO OTHER FIELDS THAN WRITING. - William Burroughs. Beat Literature and the World. Brion Gysin’s permutation poem “I Am That I Am” Similar to the cut-up videos and Dylan permutation-play recently posted, this video of schizophrenic existentialism pairs one of Brion Gysin’s permutation poems with a “videopoem” by Alex Itin. “Closely related to the principle of the cut-up, where the intended coherence of a text is interrupted and rearranged, the permutation involves a more mathematical variation of the concept as exercised on a short phrase. Concurrent with his exploration of the cut-up, Gysin discovered the permutation upon seeing in print the Divine Tautology, “I am that I am,” while reading Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception . In my 1980s interview, he elaborated: “I saw the phrase on paper and I though, ‘Ah, it looks a bit like the front of a Greek temple,’ only on the condition that I put the biggest word in the middle. So, I’ll just change those others around, ‘am I,’ in the corner of the architrave. Then I realized, as soon as I did this, it asked a question. ‘I am that, am I?’ And I said, ‘Wow, I’ve touched the oracle!’ SO then I turned the next one, and I said, ‘Oh, all the way along is has to do this.’ Thought it was the first of his permutation poems, “I Am That I Am” (1959) was not published till years later (in Brion Gysin Let the Mice In [1973]; a short version appeared in Emmet Williams’ An Anthology of Concrete Poetry [1967]). The Full version, as put through a computer by mathematician Ian Sommerville, was performed for BBC Radio in 1960, as part of a program, ‘The Permutated Poems of Brion Gysin.’ The show, says Gysin, was ‘broadcast to the second lowest rating of audience approval registered by their poll of listeners. Still sorry to think that the lowest rating on record went to an opus by Auden and Britten.'” – Back in No Time: The Brion Gysin Reader. Eyes wide shut. I met William Burroughs in 1971. I got his address through a magazine and went to London to spend time with him. Right away I asked about Brion Gysin. Gysin would always be in the dedications or introductions to Burroughs's books, but he was a mysterious character, who got little attention from the public and the people I knew. I wondered who he was and about his past in terms of the bigger picture of Burroughs's experiments, particularly with tape recorders and cut-ups. Burroughs wrote me a letter of introduction and I contacted Gysin in Paris. When I met him, I felt I knew why he was kept hidden away. He was an amazingly charming man with a powerful energy and kaleidoscopic knowledge. Once you had met him, everyone else seemed a little dull. To me, Gysin was the source of the energy we associate with the most radical experiments of the Beats. He was the real source of the ideas; other people just applied them. That was a really important shift in my appreciation of the Beatnik phenomenon. From that moment I was hooked, fascinated and impressed by each layer of Gysin I discovered. As I peeled things away over the years, I was never disappointed. There was never an end to it. He was the only person I've met whom I would unquestioningly call a genius. My first clear idea of him as an important contemporary artist and writer was through The Third Mind. Even now, I would recommend that as a very powerful manual on contemporary culture and how to explore it. I think it's the bible of experimentalism of the past 50 years. Gysin trivialised his application of cut-ups, saying that he accidentally cut through newspapers, assembled the pieces and was amused by what he read across the page. But it was obvious he had lived in Paris through the key moments of the art movements of the 20th century, particularly Dada and surrealism, and that he was very aware of the Tristan Tzara tradition of throwing words into a hat, pulling them out and reading a poem. Gysin was more methodical than he pretended. He understood more than anyone else at that point in culture that, just as we can take apart particles until there's a mystery, so we can do the same with culture, with words, language and image. Everything can be sliced and diced and reassembled, with no limit to the possible combinations. I spent six years trying to persuade Burroughs to release an album of the tape-recorder experiments he and Gysin had made. The implications of the cut-ups, the technology and tape experiments and the Dreamachine are powerful and far reaching. There's an amazing piece of tape from the 1950s, featuring Gregory Corso, Burroughs, Gysin and a couple other Beats, on which you can actually hear William cutting up a letter and saying: "Let's see what it really says." These mythological moments affected not just the careers of the protagonists, but our whole attitude to sampling, tape loops and new ways of organising popular music that would not have happened otherwise. These tape-recorder experiments in Paris are absolutely the root of industrial music. There's a very specific lineage of experimentation. I would place Gysin at the junction of the old way of perceiving the world and the new - a kind of Leonardo da Vinci of the last century. It's no accident that the atom got split and gave us particle physics at the time LSD was doing the same with consciousness and Gysin and Burroughs were doing it with culture. Though Gysin was outwardly rather sceptical, in private he was very mystical and interested in the tradition of the artist-healer. If one didn't look at the very nature of how we build and describe our world, he thought, we get into very dangerous places. Once you believe things are permanent, you're trapped in a world without doors. Gysin constructed a room with infinite doors for us to walk through. What amazed me about Gysin's work was how it could be applied to behaviour: there were techniques to free oneself through the equivalent of cutting up and reassembling words. If we confound and break up the proposed unfolding the world impresses upon us, we can give ourselves the space to consider what we want to be as a species. I first saw Gysin's calligraphic works as abstract paintings. Gysin told me they were paintings of light and, once I saw they were depictions of light striking things, I began to see people, trees, landscapes, all kinds of vistas that were realities I hadn't seen before. He basically paints portals that shift our perception as we look, changing the way we see things. The Dreamachine was the first artwork to be looked at with the eyes closed. Gysin's art illustrates the way the eye and the brain decode information. If you work with a dreamachine you go through various stages that relate to Gysin's paintings and drawings, which actually documented the images that seem to occur when you are fed pure light by flicker. More interesting is that a lot of them were done as magical, functional paintings. He would take words, break them down into hieroglyphics, then turn the paper and do it again and again until the magical square was filled with words. Gysin worked with the idea of painting as magic, to change the perception of people and to reprogramme the human nervous system. The original motives for what we now call art were the functional techniques of the shaman to make things happen (for a hunt to be successful, for example), to explore dimensions of consciousness that would otherwise be inaccessible, much like the Dreamachine. Gysin used any medium, working with it to find a way to demonstrate that reality could be turned into a jigsaw: then we could make the pictures we wanted from it rather than inheriting them from other people. His last painting, Caligraffiti of Fire, was a beautiful work hung on all four walls of a room so that you had to spin round to see it. Instead of the Dreamachine spinning and the viewer being static with their eyes closed, the viewer stands in the centre of the room and spins with eyes open. People are tricked by it into doing a dervish dance. I'd imagine, in the perfect situation, Gysin would have liked the viewer to spin round until they fell over, and then see what happened. I made an agreement with Gysin before his death that I would try to champion and vindicate his work and legacy. He was living opposite the Beaubourg in Paris, and any time I had spare money I would go to see him. I'd get up and go to his apartment at around 11am, make mint tea, then sit down at his table by the new flower arrangement - he liked to have fresh flowers - and start talking. And then it would be 11 at night and I'd go back to where I was staying and come back the next morning. In a way, he was my university. I'm glad to have been a student. Back in No Time: The Brion Gysin Reader by Brion Gysin. Artist : Brion Gysin Label : Sloow Tapes, Stekene, Belgium Year : 2015 Box set of two C-60 cassettes Limited edition of 100 € 20.00 Postage not included. Released on Bart De Paepe’s Sloow Tapes label from Belgium and available from Sea Urchin: Brion Gysin – Back In No Time , a reissue of a box set which originally appeared in the Staaltape Documentatie Series in 1988. One cassette contains an interview of Gysin by Dutch artist and poet Harry Hoogstraten at Schiphol airport, 21 June 1981, and the other The Master Musicians of Joujouka, recorded live in France. British/Canadian artist and writer Brion Gysin (1916-1986) moved to Paris in the 1930s where he briefly joined the Surrealist Movement until having the honour of being expelled by André Breton. After World War II he moved to Tangier where, in 1954, he opened ‘1001 Nights Restaurant’ with his friend Mohammed Hamri, to whom he had been introduced by Paul Bowles. Hamri’s uncle was the leader of the Master Musicians of Joujouka and through Hamri Gysin got acquainted with the music of this group. In his turn Gysin introduced Burroughs (and later Brian Jones) to Joujouka music. Like Paul Bowles and William Burroughs Gysin traced this Sufi trance music to the ancient Rites of Pan. Gysin and Hamri invited the musicians to play in their Tangier restaurant throughout the 1950s to a largely Western audience. After having lost the restaurant Gysin returned to Paris in 1958, where he took lodgings at the Beat Hotel with William Burroughs and helped develop the cut-up technique and the dream machine. Gysin stayed in Paris to work on his art and writings until his death in 1986. Interview of Brion Gysin on various subjects and people: Harry Hoogstraten. Cover photo of Gysin preparing a hashish pipe at Ins & Outs Press, Amsterdam in the early 1980s: Eddie Woods. Inside photo taken in Amsterdam, 1979 by Harry Hoogstraten. Art by Brion Gysin. Last available copy.